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Wednesday, April 8, 2015

I feel like I should probably get this out of the way right at the beginning: Faye is more or less impossible to photograph. Keep that in mind.

Faye's the brown one. You remember the brown one. Super-slow to develop, which was even more agonizing than normal because I was anxious to see how the bloom would turn out. But so here it is:

As sometimes happens, the front and back of the spathe are different colors. The back stayed more or less the same medium wood-brown throughout the bud development, and only started to change after the spathe had been fully open for a while. The spathe interior is a dull light orange. This is the most accurate photo I could get that shows both colors at once:

I was sort of braced for Faye to be awesome, and I was sort of prepared for her to be terrible, but this is neither of those, so I'm not sure what to feel.

What I actually got is probably more pleasant-looking than what I would have had if the interior matched the exterior. If nothing else, it doesn't look as dead as I'd thought it might. Which is possibly good. And I like that it's something new and different, even if it's not quite as different as I was expecting. We lucked out with the contrasting spadix, too: a matching spadix on this color would have been gross. And the foliage is good.

It's just that it's a little too pretty to be ugly, and a little too ugly to be pretty.

The other thing this means is that I probably didn't have to get 'Midori' last summer after all, since I apparently already had a plant that produces chlorophyll in the spathes. The seed parent is the NOID red, which even if the spathes on the NOID red aren't particularly dark or brownish, they're dark enough that it seems plausible that that's where the green is coming from. (For the orange, there's really only one plausible choice -- 'Orange Hot,' which seems to have been involved in most or all of the seedlings with orange blooms.1) Though 'Midori' is now kind of exciting on her own, since I'm pretty sure the first bloom of 'Midori' that I pollinated had the NOID red as the pollen parent. The seedlings from that cross2 could, in theory, wind up red, red-brown, green, or tan.

So what do you think? Pretty? Ugly? Neither? Both? Interesting? "Interesting?"3

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1 'Orange Hot' is the seed parent for 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" and 0031 "Sylvester," both of which are solidly orange, as well as the orange-then-pink 0118 "Elijah Sturdabowtit."0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha" looks orange so far, but has not yet opened a bud, so that's a tentative confirmation of the theory: her seed parent is 'Orange Hot' also.
The only orange blooming seedling that doesn't work with this theory is 0329 "Gladys Panzarov," but whatever explains Faye also explains Gladys, since they're siblings.
The strangest thing, for me, is that 'Orange Hot,' despite the name, is barely orange at all. I mean, Eliza, Sylvester, Elijah, Marsha, and Gladys are all way more decisively orange than 'Orange Hot.' Which makes me very curious about why it's named that. Was "Peach Hot' taken?2 Only four of which are official so far: 1033 "Phoenix," 1092 "Mia Amor," 1093 "Luna Stones," and 1094 "Ella Vawaydego." Here's a recent picture of Phoenix:

I do still have some seedlings from this cross still in the germination containers, though.3 I.e., I hate it but I don't want to say so to your face like this so I'll say something ambiguous and let you decide what you want it to mean.

Monday, April 6, 2015

I mentioned in a post last year that Google said V. Princess Mikasa can also be pink, but that I hadn't seen it personally. And now I have.

I can't figure out from the available information whether this is from the same cross that produced the original blue-violet Princess Mikasa, or if it's a different cross that someone just named the same. The International Orchid Register doesn't have a separate entry for Princess Mikasa Pink (so that's probably not even its name, technically: it's probably just Princess Mikasa), which makes me think it's probably a sibling of the blue-violet Princess Mikasa, but the world of orchids is often illogical, redundant, self-contradictory, or counterintuitive, and I gave up on it making sense a long time ago, so bear in mind that that's only a guess.

If the pink Princess Mikasa is from the same cross as the violet Princess Mikasa, its ancestry is:

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